-
El Destino Hauling
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 1 IwasraisedtothinkofTíoNandoasjustthat—an uncle, part of that huge group of men who grew up with my father . When I realized that I also called his son, Fernandito, Tío, I asked my father how they could both be my uncles. I was eight then. My father fumbled with the domino stand in front of him. —What do you want? He’s my uncle, he’s my cousin. He pointed to the balding man shuffling dominos—Nando— then to the one with the dark ponytail. I felt confused and so kept staring—how then were they my tíos? He refused to look at me and instead paid a lot of attention to the dominos lying face down on the table, waiting to be chosen. In picking his ten, he got the double zero, but his face betrayed nothing to the others. El Destino Hauling 1 2 E l D e s t i n o H a u l i n g Still studying his fichas, he finally said, They’re nobody to you. But he said it in English—a language he never learned to trust—which made me doubt his answer. Also, he’d had a couple beers because, as Nando had yelled into our answering machine that afternoon, we were celebrating: Fernandito and Nando had just moved in together after being kicked out by their respective wives. The woman who kicked Nando out, Linet, was not Fernandito ’s mother; that woman had stayed in Cuba, had kicked Nando out close to ten years before I was even born. Muchtomymother’sfury,Ispentmostofthatnightbythedomino table instead of on the screened-in porch with her and the other married-in family members. I remember hanging on the table’s edge, my fingers curled beneath its plastic top, watching my father and my various tíos christen the new apartment with toasts and marathon domino games. Aside from my cousin Ileana, who was four months older than me and therefore cooler than my sister Nuria, and my Tía Maribel, Ileana’s grandmother and Nando’s sister, I was the only girl inside, my face so close to the beer bottles that I could see each individual bead of water tremble its way down the sweating glass. Nuria, having just turned five, was too little to escape from my mom’s lap and join us inside. I watched her watery eyes through the rust-rimmed windows, and I knew my desertion would earn me her back that night, that she would not face me as we slept side by side on the sofa bed. I even thought of leaving the table, since back then I’d already started having trouble falling asleep and usually had to make myself drowsy by counting her long lashes or the number of her breaths. But the men had started a game and were now slamming the dominos down, numbers-side up, and the clatter made me turn back to them, to Nando’s broad hand pushing his piece in place. Nando brought the dominos with him from Cuba, having bribed an official during his exit inspection not to take them from him. They were made of real ivory, but had yellowed over the years, so much so that they reminded me then of butterscotch candies. I remember wanting to grab one and take it home to show to Nuria later and win her back, but I knew better than to try and touch something so many men found so valuable. E l D e s t i n o H a u l i n g 13 It was at that domino table—hours after my mother gave up trying to make time-to-go eye contact with my father, then with me, from her spot outside—that I first heard about the Dump Truck Plan. Going into that night, it seemed to me common family knowledge that Nando and Fernandito made their living through various schemes, usually insurance fraud. Fernandito’s wife, it turned out, actually left him because she refused to be part of yet another slip-and-fall case. She was tired, he told the other men, of having to do groceries in a neck brace. Fernandito had funded his late twenties and early thirties with car insurance scams; people who for whatever reason wanted to get rid of their cars would arrange for Fernandito to “steal” them, then he would take the car someplace, strip it for parts, and set...